(WoW) Trolls, Dragons, and Mutant Hydras, Oh My!

Well, I got to see the redone Zul'Gurub Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, due to timing, I wasn't able to finish it. The place is big, touch, and full of gimmicks. Actually I like it, save the time investment again - dungeons keep coming back to that for me. I know that will get somewhat better down the line, but in the meantime, it's frustrating to sink a couple hours into something like that and still not finish. Maybe we should have skipped the archaeology boss? Ah well. Venoxis is hectic, but wasn't too difficult. Mandokir is entertaining as he one-shots people through the fight (though they get brought back) and "levels up." For the archaeology-requiring event, we got Wushoolay, who had a couple lightning attacks, but was easy enough. Kilnara was the one who gave us the most trouble. We wiped once to a panther swarm because someone was trying to use the rats for... something... and failing. After that, though it took a few times to figure it out, her Wave of Agony ability was killing people. And even once we did figure that out, people had trouble getting out of the way. Zanzil took a second try, mostly because I was learning to dodge his fire I think. And Jin'do... mmm. Once people actually got in the anti-magic shells (which seemed to take unduly long), we got to the second phase reliably, but we weren't able to get more than one chain down before being overrun. And, as we were getting too close to raid time, I had to bow out to eat (I think the group essentially disbanded then, but I'm not sure). There were lots of mail drops and one wand that was useful to a warlock, at least.

The raid went okay - ups and downs. On the down side, we had what felt like a lot of trouble with Valiona and Theralion - and actually spent our usual timeframe just on two boss encounters. It looks like our fifth attempt was successful, but it sure felt like more than that. I want to say "How hard can it be to get out of the way of dragon breath?) but that's not really fair since when I'm tanking I almost never have to worry about it. A couple times, we got too bunched up going into phase 2, and there's still some misunderstanding of what marks indicate what. But we ended up successful there again - still a tough fight for us, but not a one-off victory. Then we went back to Chimaeron, which we've tried many times before without much luck. After the trouble with the dragons, I wasn't expecting much, so I was amazed when we actually did better our first try than I think we have before. I'm not sure if folks have been getting up, getting better, or something just clicked. After that, it got rough again, though, as we lost a healer to computer problems and had to shuffle around. After a few more tries, he made it back and we reorganized to our original configuration and got Chimaeron down. Sure there were only three or four people standing at the end, but that's almost a given in that fight. That brings the guild to 7/12 "main" tier bosses and talk about saving lockouts (though I think only one person really has to do that). I sort of suspect we'll focus on Atramedes next, but I'm not positive. We'll see.

Patch adjustments haven't changed anything too radically. I love not having to worry about missing with Rebuke - though there was once against Maloriak on Friday night that I got worried about an aberration release and interrupted that, so my interrupts were on cooldown for an storm (owch). The cooldown on Word of Glory... is something I feel. I was as prone to tossing that out to help healers as to use it on myself, but now I'm more selfish with it and try to time it for Mangle or the Massacre at the end of Chimaeron's Feud.